Without trying to judge your personal take on the thing...
Let's say that you could create a situation where you could get anything like a majority of folks to agree that the statues/monuments/whatever should wind up in some corner of a museum that is easy to avoid instead of being destroyed.
Straight question, when would it have been the right time to do so?
Decades ago? A quarter century?
You can't wait until the very moment that the things in question have an actual target on them, and then say "Uh, I got this idea..."